Like all military dictators, Lincoln was intensely micro-managerial in his prosecution of the Civil War.
He was so frequently in contact with his top commanders, that he is well-known for having spent more of his administration in the War Department's telegraph office than anywhere else.
According to historian James McPherson, Lincoln's management of the war was "a work of genius" and many of "the most dramatic events in Lincoln's presidency grew out of his direct intervention in strategic command decisions."
How strange, then, to find that historians like McPherson simultaneously claim Abraham Lincoln had no knowledge of the litany of war crimes that his generals consistently committed.
How could Lincoln both have been so involved in the war and also totally ignorant of the atrocities levelled against civilians by his most senior commanders?
The answer: Lincoln wasn't ignorant.
It may come as a shock to find out that the man who had no qualms about suspending the rule of law somehow found it in his heart to disregard innocent life. As shocking as it is, that is the case.
What an earth am I referring to?
The systematic targeting of innocent women, children, and old men by Lincoln and his commanders Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, and Pope.
The Targeting of Civilians
First, a word on why the Union armies were hell-bent on killing innocent people.
Despite any presumptions we may have to the contrary, the Union armies were losing the war by 1862.
As Thomas DiLorenzo has shown, at the end of the first year of the war most of the world believed the South was winning.
This shouldn't be surprising considering just two facts:
1) the war was extremely unpopular in the North (see my previous article on Lincoln)
and
2) many of the North's best generals were enemies of Lincoln (one even ran against him in the next election).
If you didn't know, Lincoln had a hard time keeping generals under his employment. Time and again, he would have to switch out his leading officers from their stations.
Lincoln went through so many generals because these experienced commanders differed from the President ever-so-slightly in their strategic goals.
The President wanted to target civilian cities and to destroy the Southern economy. Most of his generals were not as ready to violate international and US law, let alone their own moral consciences.
So Lincoln shuffled through his top command until he arrived at Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Pope.
These men were all quite comfortable killing innocent non-combatants, so they were perfect for Lincoln's war-plan.
The only problem was, with the possible exception of Grant, none of them were particularly good at being generals.
Every one of them met with a series of successive defeats. Sherman and Pope, in particular, seemed rather inept as tactical commanders.
So Lincoln shifted his strategy— he began almost exclusively targeting civilians.
As much as I would love to recount each and every vile act committed by Lincoln's generals, I'm assuming you don't have hours to dedicate to this blog post.
So instead I will choose just one example of thousands and hope it gives you a sense of the horror.
The Sherman Death March
We all learned about the famous "Sherman's March" in school.
Conventional history describes Sherman's "March to the Sea" as a military campaign through Georgia. It began after the "capture" of Atlanta in November 1864 and ended with the capture of Savannah in December.
What we usually don't learn in school was that Sherman's March was a campaign against the civilians of Georgia and not any confederate army.
First, let's ask ourselves why the campaign was so "successful."
In a matter of weeks Sherman was able to decimate Georgia. This is largely because the Confederate resistance had expected Sherman to follow their armies to Tennessee– y'know, where the actual armies were.
They could not have been more wrong.
With Georgia basically emptied of organized resistance, Sherman was virtually unchallenged as he "foraged" through Georgia.
In violation of international and US law, but to the praise of Lincoln and Grant, he targeted civilian lives and property.
So, here is the real story of the "capture" of Atlanta by Sherman:
Bombing
By the time Sherman had arrived at Atlanta, he was well-practiced in the destruction of defenseless towns and cities. As such, he began by ordering the city be bombed every few minutes.
The bombing of besieged cities was illegal under US law in the 1860s, not to mention morally deplorable, so this was already a war crime. However the extent to which Sherman destroyed Atlanta should make anyone shiver.
In a city with virtually no defenses, the death toll quickly reached into the thousands. After being bombed day and night, the city was burned to the ground.
The famous "chief-engineer" of Sherman's army, Captain O.M. Poe, was horrified by what he saw. As one historian put it:
When Sherman's chief engineer, O. M. Poe, voiced his dismay at seeing so many corpses of women and young children in the streets of Atlanta, Sherman coldly told him that such scenes were “a beautiful sight.”
"A beautiful sight." That's definitely the statement of the kind of top-notch moral character we want leading our troops.
Some estimates of the so-called "capture" of Atlanta indicate that as much as 90% of the property and population were wiped-out.
The remaining population was forced to leave the city in the heart of winter, so we can safely assume virtually everyone in the city was killed.
In his writings, Captain Poe mentions that the bombing of Atlanta had "no strategic value" whatsoever.
Pillaging and Control
After moving into the city, Sherman's army went on a rampage of looting that was all-too-familiar to Union soldiers. Even the corpses in the cemeteries were dug up and stripped of valuables, and their churches destroyed.
After decimating Atlanta, Sherman ordered his subordinates to begin murdering random civilians each time they received word of a Confederate attack. Sherman literally used the words "random citizens" in his order.
A crowd of commanding officers joined Sherman in this practice.
Confederate armies were regularly forced to trade Union officers they had captured in battle for Southern civilians held as hostages.
One of Sherman's soldiers wrote of the March:
“Never before have I witnessed so much wanton destruction as on this march. The soldiers are perfectly abandoned.”
Captain Poe, who was eventually promoted to Colonel by Sherman for his efforts in the war described Sherman's March as "an orgy of robbing and plundering." He prayed that "it may never be my duty to see the like of it again."
A Rule, Not The Exception
Unfortunately the picture I have painted here is a not a unique one. Long before Sherman ever reached Atlanta, he was butchering innocents in the name of a "scorched earth" policy.
The rest of Sherman's March followed the same path of destruction and death.
The sacking of Colombia in South Carolina, for example, would make Atlanta look like a mercy killing.
There are endless accounts of raping Southern women and slaves, burning towns, murdering unarmed civilians, and stealing property on a level which would not be seen again until the revolutions of Lenin and Castro.
Sherman's March was thus an American holocaust. Sherman, like Lincoln, prefigured the socialists of the twentieth century in his desire to stripe the South of its life and wealth, saying:
"A woman who has fifty loads of fine furniture deserves to lose it."
And in a letter to his wife, describing the purpose of his war:
“Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.”
Historians and The Lincoln War Crimes
The most incredible aspect about what I just told you is that it is not controversial in the slightest.
You might think a claim like – Lincoln and all of his top commanders violated international and US law, including the Geneve Convention, by committing heinous war crimes against Southern civilians – might be met with some push-back from conventional historians.
It isn't.
No one denies the atrocities perpetrated against the Southern people. No ones denies Lincoln's generals targeted civilians.
No one denies that they burned down cities, slaughtering thousands of women, children, and elderly.
Many historians seek to defend Lincoln and his generals in each individual case by appealing to the fact that every other general was also engaged in the same acts of evil. As if it does anything to absolve Sherman to say that Pope was killing innocents at the same time.
Another popular argument is to say that the war was "inevitable" and the sanctity of the so-called "Union" had to be preserved "at all costs."
I am unconvinced. I don't think you should be convinced.
Thomas Jefferson was certainly not a believer in the "perpetual Union" of Lincoln. Nor ought we to be, but I'll save that for another time.
At the very least, a true reckoning with our history should show all of us just how fragile our bonds of society are – as well as to what depths the power-hungry will go to destroy their ideological enemies.
Further Reading
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I cannot recommend enough The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians by Mark Grimsley. He does his best to defend Lincoln and Sherman, but his account of the war betrays his desire to cast Lincoln as a bright light.
You can also read James McPherson's Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution for a very conventional version of the story.
For a full treatment of Sherman's March I would recommend Lee Kennett's Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldier and Civilian During Sherman's Campaign.
Of course, the most accessible history you will find is Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln. DiLorenzo is simply the best when it comes to unmasking Lincoln.
But he had a cool hat